WHO COVID-19 response has worsened the disaster

It is not yet certain whether the World Health Organisation’s sudden retreat from its previously trenchant defence of China’s disease-ridden “wet markets” was a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s announcement that he was suspending US funding for the organisation. The US has been the WHO’s major donor for decades, contributing $US452m ($704m) a year to the organisation’s $US4.2bn annual budget. The WHO’s change of heart about the wet markets suggests director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is finally starting to understand the extent of global anger over the WHO’s bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

As Mr Trump said in announcing the suspension of US payments, the COVID-19 outbreak could have been contained at its source with far fewer deaths and worldwide economic damage been avoided had the WHO done its job and sent medical experts into China earlier to objectively assess the situation and call out China’s lack of transparency at the outset. “Instead, the WHO took Chinese assurances at face value and defended the actions of the Chinese government, even praising China for its so-called transparency,’’ the President said. “I don’t think so. The WHO’s reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in COVID-19 cases worldwide, and it may be even more than that. Countries across the world are suffering devastation because of its failure.”

As the world passed 2 million coronavirus cases with 127,000 deaths, Mr Trump’s arguments were a telling indictment of the failure of the UN agency that is funded by the nations of the world to lead the response to catastrophes such as this pandemic.

The world needs an international health body. But as the truth emerges about the WHO’s handling of COVID-19, it is clear that if it is to survive beyond the current crisis, the world’s nations, especially members of the G7 and G20 which contribute the lion’s share of its funding, must insist on a major overhaul to vastly improve its performance. Too often in UN organisations, officials let political influences destroy good policy outcomes and operations.

Mr Trump has reason to be particularly angry after 27,000 deaths in the US so far from 615,000 cases of the disease. As Cameron Stewart reported on Wednesday, shocked Americans witnessing scenes of hospitals being overrun and body bags piling up on top of each other in refrigerated trucks are “asking questions about why they are watching such desperate scenes in a country as advanced as the US”. The pressures on Mr Trump in the lead-up to November’s election are immense.

He is far from alone in his concerns about the WHO. Modelling by researchers at the University of Southampton concludes that global cases of COVID-19 could have been reduced by 95 per cent had China, and the WHO, acted three weeks earlier to alert the world to what was happening.

And Scott Morrison is facing pressure from backbenchers to make Australia’s $53m-a-year taxpayer-funded contribution to the organisation conditional on reforms to the body. Even some Labor MPs agree. But he and Josh Frydenberg cited the WHO’s good work in the Pacific as a reason Australia would not be halting or cutting funding to the organisation. Mr Morrison, who has been highly critical of the WHO over its unfathomable endorsement of China’s wet markets, wants reform of the WHO from within its own ranks.

China, which has donated only $133m to the WHO in the past two years, hit back on Wednesday at claims that it had manipulated international institutions. Two days ago, the WHO insisted it would not advocate for the closing of Chinese wet markets because they were “sources of livelihood and food security’’. But on Wednesday, the WHO special COVID-19 envoy David Nabarro said the markets were a danger because “75 per cent of emerging infections come from the animal kingdom’’.

One of the WHO’s worst calls at the outset was to oppose the Trump administration’s January 31 decision to ban flights from China. WHO claimed the move would be “counter-productive” in dealing with the outbreak. As Mr Trump said on Tuesday, despite reports circulating as early as December about the virus, the WHO “failed to investigate reports from credible sources in Wuhan that conflicted with Chinese official accounts. There were credible accounts of human-to-human transmission in December which should have spurred it to investigate. Instead, he said, through mid-January the WHO “parroted and publicly endorsed (Chinese insistence) that there was no human-to-human transmission’’. At that stage, it said the virus was not communicable and travel bans were not necessary. Mr Morrison, too, was highly critical of the WHO’s tardiness, noting that his government “called this thing (the pandemic) weeks before the WHO did. If we were relying on their advice, then I suspect we would have been suffering the same fate that many other countries currently are. We were calling it a pandemic back in mid-January.’’ The WHO, he said, did not adopt the term until March 11. The WHO has fallen abysmally short of its mission statement to lead global health responses. Its failures have contributed to loss of life and made the impact of the disease worse for millions of people.